Friday, September 07, 2007

The more attention Ron Paul gets, the more desperately spinners like Hannedy try discredit him, and the more people of all political affiliations who can read, spell and do the math sign up for the Ron Paul bandwagon. He won the latest Fox debate with 33 percent (their count) despite the best efforts of those merchants of sleaze on fox to slant, discredit and throw spitballs. Paul took a true hazing, effortlessly, yet passionately providing intelligent answers to loaded questions, while his lightweight competition was being tossed big wet kisses underhand. The response was overwhelming - over a third of the responses were for Paul and the best response to that result by the other candidates was that their supporters "didn't know how to send text messages."

Currently maintaining the top three positions are Barack Obama, 20.65 percent, Hillary Clinton, 11.71 percent and Ron Paul with 11.36 percent.The largest decliner this week was Rudy Giuliani, down 0.60 percent.The largest gainers included Chris Dodd up 0.28 percent, John McCain up0.30 percent and Fred Thompson up 0.22 percent. For full results, seebelow.

The Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Indexis the first quantitative measure of the Internet-wide performance ofeach presidential candidate(http://spartaninternet.com/2008/byParty.asp?tab=2) for the 2008election. The index gauges the level of support and how well eachcandidate is connecting with individuals across the Internet.

At this early stage, results like that are surprising, considering that of all the candidates, Paul is the only one being actively discredited by MSM interests, at least, that I'm aware of. Most of the other "second tier" candidates are simply ignored.

Placing third overall is, as I said, surprising at this early stage, especially considering how totally obscure Ron Paul was just a few months ago. But clearly he has his fellow Republicans running scared. One only has to look at the "reaction shots" in debate videos to see the funk sweat. The fact is, Paul is the only one on utterly unassailable ground from a constitutional and traditional, Conservative Republican perspective

Rep. Ron Paul was the most impressive candidate in the recentRepublican debate.Rep. Ron Paul was the most impressive candidate in the recentRepublican debate. He is the dramatic winner in the latest CSPANCapital News poll, where 73% believe he won, compare to 8% for Romney,his nearest rival (http://capitalnews.org/).&amp;#160;Huckabee, who garnered so much attention on This Week, was at 2% onthis poll! Ron Paul also leads MSMBC's poll by a clear margin (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18421356/).

I think Ron Paul has an excellent shot at winning both the Republican nomination and the presidency if the votes are honest. That is, of course, one gigantic "if."